Category Archives: Uncategorized

I recently gave an interview to a left-anarchist podcast. While they decided not to post it, there is a discussion of it on this podcast. The relevant part starts around 19:30 and the part about our interview starts around 26 minutes in.

In a surprising change of tone, Israel has expressed readiness to reopen the Quneitra border crossing with Syria in the Golan Heights, now that the Arab country’s armed forces have purged militant groups from there.

“We are ready to open the crossing as it was before, and now the ball is in the Syrian court,” Israeli minister for military affairs Avigdor Lieberman told reporters as he toured the border area on Thursday.

Lieberman, who has a long history of hurling threats of doom and destruction against Syria and President Bashar al-Assad, added that Israel never wanted conflict with Syria and was ready to ensure a 1974 armistice agreement between the two sides is strictly observed.

“We said from the beginning that we have no interest in meddling in the … war within Syria and we have never intervened. What interests us is ensuring the security” of Israelis, Lieberman said.

The Golan Heights is a Syrian territory, which Tel Aviv has been occupying since 1967 and claims as its own territory despite international criticism.

In August, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) returned to the border between Syria and the occupied territories, four years after it was shuttered due to militant attacks.

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – An American political analyst said the triangle of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the US was behind the recent terrorist attack in Iran’s southwestern city of Ahvaz, adding that Saudi Arabia has been consistently involved in providing support for terrorist activities across the region.

“It is quite likely that the perpetrators of the attack have received support from Saudi Arabia. This would certainly be in keeping with Saudi Arabia’s past history in the region,” Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, told Tasnim in an interview.

He added, “A likely strategy that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are pursuing is to increase the hostilities toward Iran to the point that the United States will engage in military intervention against Iran, and on behalf of the (Persian) Gulf states.”

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was founded in 1983 after being conceived by President Reagan and ex-CIA Director and then Vice-President Bush. It was created to take the place of the CIA after it’s fall from grace and worldwide condemnation for attempted of accomplished coups in many countries on 4 continents.

It was decided that a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) would keep America’s hands clean and could still accomplish all of the same goals.

In a White House memo it’s goals were stated quite plainly. “We need to examine how law and Executive Order can be made more liberal to permit covert action on a broader scale, as well as what we can do through substantially increased overt political action.”[1]

At the March 1990 NED board meeting, President Carl Gershman called the “victory of the democratic opposition in Nicaragua… a tremendous victory for the Endowment as well.” The board minutes continued:

I haven’t always been an anarchist but I’ve always been a radical. After being raised in the pro-life movement I discovered the Communist Manifesto as a 14 year old lapsed malcontent. I didn’t understand every word of it but the inflammatory anti-clerical rhetoric lit a fire in me that never went out. After spending several years as a teenage anarchist, influenced in equal measure by Subcomandante Marcos and Johnny Rotten, I turned to state socialism, inspired by the bold anti-imperialist antics of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution. It was also around this time that I became enamored by tales of the Bolsheviks, Che Guevara, and those dastardly Castro brothers. Marxist-Leninism and Democratic Centralism made sense to a twenty-something closeted agoraphobic. Like my life it felt preserved in formaldehyde. It felt safe.

But there’s nothing radical about safe and when I came out of the closet to take my life back from mental illness and gender tyranny, I was ready to dream dangerously again. The suspiciously early demise of Hugo Chavez followed shortly by the cataclysmic failure of his signature revolution was the final straw. Chavez did everything right but when he dropped dead the revolution dropped dead with him. For me, that was the last nail in the coffin for state socialism or state anything for that matter. I was drawn back to anarchism by the unexpected triumph of the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria and the prison writings of the man who inspired it, another post-Marxist anti-statist named Abdullah Ocalan. But I’ve remained both conscious and unapologetic of my tangled radical roots and my objectives have always remained the same, the creation of a classless post-capitalist society.

“I have a news item that might interest you. It is a 47 page report (with references) from the Human Rights Commission by one of their independent experts sent to investigate Venezuela. In the report he names the US, Canada, EU and Columbia and specifically Barack Obama and Donald Trump as needing to be charged with crimes against humanity. He documents how the media, IMF, World Bank, Standard&Poors, Moody and Fitch, as well as internal named opposition, NGO’s, international monetary exchange criminals colluded. He references work by Abby Martin and the Real News in some of his sources. Here is one of his recommendations:
The Independent Expert recommends that, until the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court address the lethal outcomes of economic wars and sanctions regimes, the Permanent Peoples Tribunal, the Russell Tribunal and the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission undertake the task so as to facilitate future judicial pronouncements.”https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/G1823931.pdf

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report about Venezuela on August 30 explaining that the country’s situation is the result of an economic war, a financial blockade and a media attack that reinforces a supposed ‘humanitarian crisis’.

In episode 9 of Unraveling Political Theory, welcoming back Tim and Keith from a temporary absence, they will be discussing Trump’s foreign policy and the idea of globalism. They discuss Zionism and Israeli influence on US policy, China and the ongoing geopolitical battle with the US, and the many political dynamics at play within the Trump administration. Coming to terms with different political movements and what they represent is at the core of what this podcast is all about.

“I’m sure feminists and left libertarians are now focused on the character flaw of his paying for sex. Christians have no interest in defending his vice. Southern Nationalists and the alt right suddenly checked out because “LOL, another damn libertarian”. The NRA isn’t likely to even discuss the issue. It’s like someone knows the chatter of all of these groups and picked an option most likely to sever his base of support.”

This is why radicals fail. Solidarity against the common enemy, whether you prefer to call it globalism, capitalism, imperialism, Wall Street, banksters, NWO, ZOG, the Illuminati or the lizard people, is completely absent among most radicals.

US President Donald Trump has many enemies among fellow members of the Republican Party and his own administration, an American journalist and analyst says.

Keith Preston, the chief editor of AttacktheSystem, told Press TV in an interview on Thursday that Trump has many enemies, not only among media and the Democrats, but also, in his own party and his staff.

The media depicted Secretary of Defense James Mattis as one of the senior members of the Trump administration who opposed the president and called him an “idiot”.

“Periodic crises and wars are used to whip up support for other plunder-reward cycles which in effect tighten the noose around our individual liberties. And of course we have hordes of academic sponges, amoral businessmen, and just plain hangers-on, to act as non-productive recipients for the plunder.

Stop the circle of plunder and immoral reward and elitist structures collapse. But not until a majority finds the moral courage and the internal fortitude to reject the something-for-nothing con game and replace it by voluntary associations, voluntary communes, or local rule and decentralized societies, will the killing and the plunder cease.”

A left-anarchist discusses the limitations of social democracy. Listen here.

.

The discussion itself was very good, although I found the intro monologue to be something of a turn off in the sense that it sounded like a barrage of buzzwords and catchphrases (kind of like reciting the Apostles’ Creed in church). The point the guy being interviewed seemed to be making was “We should use grassroots direct action rather than electoral politics to A) get more free ice cream days and B ) oppose things leftists don’t like.” For instance, at one point he actually praises Nixon for creating the EPA and OSHA (“More centralized state bureaucracies! Yay! Vivia de Anarchia!”). He seems to be mostly regurgitating what David Graeber called “small ‘a’ anarchism” or “social movement anarchism.” In fact, he sounds a lot like what my anarchist friends and I would have been talking about 25-30 years ago.

I don’t think his point of view is “wrong” in the same sense that I don’t necessarily think Alexander Reid Ross’ “anarcho-MSNBC” perspective is “wrong” in the sense that it’s fine to have an anarchist tendency that’s merely about opposing Trump, the “far right” or official enemies of the US like Russia or Syria like Reid-Ross’ crowd, and it’s not “wrong” to have anarchist tendencies that are just about “social movement left-activism” like these “DSA anarchists” or whatever they are. But I view anarchist philosophy and politics as much bigger than all that.

That’s what President Donald Trump supposedly instructed his former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn to do in response to the budget deficit. The quote appears in Bob Woodward’s controversial book Fear: Trump in the White House.

Trump disputes many of the anecdotes Woodward assembled. But regardless of whether the President used those exact words, they do reflect an “easy money” philosophy that he has expressed many times before.

Trump Likes Low Rates, Loose Money

President Trump has described himself as a “low interest rate person.”

This past summer, Trump launched a very public attack on the Federal Reserve’s rate hiking campaign. He wants it to stop because it’s making the dollar “too strong” and threatening to undercut his tax cut fiscal stimulus.

There’s only so much dollar strength the U.S. economy and U.S. debt and equity markets can take. President Trump is keenly aware of the risks.

Regardless of how you feel about the son of a bitch (or his apparently abortion-shy bitch mother), it’s becoming pretty hard to ignore the fact that the establishment, personified by both major parties, the legacy media, and the so called intelligence community, fucking hates President Donald J. Trump. With the New York Times latest revelation of an inter-administration resistance and Bob Woodword’s latest tabloid airport flyswatter, the movement to remove or contain our red-headed stepchild of an Electoral College despot has never been more vibrant. This puts me in a pretty weird position, not just because I’ve devoted my life to bitch slapping bigots like the Donald and upsetting the fanged mandarins of the establishment who so oppose him but because I find it strange that these fellow swamp critters despise each other so damn much.

Some of this is obviously theater. Donald Trump ran a successful campaign largely on trashing the Fourth Estate that Middle-America has come to despise for their impressive track record of fooling them into unwinnable wars and shitty trade deals. And the Fourth Estate made this campaign possible with their round the clock coverage of the free-wheeling MAGA circus. Every time the press attacks Trump he gets to play the role of the anti-establishment victim that his fans identify with. And every time Trump makes some vaguely fascist empty threat against the mass media they get to play the role of the embattled crusaders for truth. In both cases, Trump sees his approval numbers go up and the press sees their ratings go up with them. It’s a mutually abusive, codependent relationship straight out of a Dr. Phil rerun.More…

The administration of US President Donald Trump’s unconditional support for Saudi Arabia despite the kingdom’s many crimes in Yemen makes Washington a complicit in the onslaught, says an American analyst.

Keith Preston, director of the Attackthesystem.org, made the remarks during an interview with Press TV about the White House’s continued backing of the Saudi-led military aggression against Yemen despite international outrage.

Earlier this week, as the months-long offensive by the Saudis and their regional allies to capture Yemen’s important port city of al-Hudaydah continued, Saudi commanders announced Wednesday that they had been able to block two key supply routes into the city, The Washington Post reported.

That was bad news for millions of people in Yemen who are struggling with hunger and deadly cholera outbreaks, as the city acts as a gateway for 70 percent of food and medicine supplies sent to the conflict-ridden country.

This is while the Saudi-led coalition has had the port city under aerial and maritime blockade since the beginning of the war in March 2015.

Despite all this, however, the Trump administration certified to Congress on Tuesday that the Saudis and their allies were “making every effort to reduce the risk of civilian casualties.”

The official notice was required for the Pentagon to be allowed to continue delivering weapons and intelligence to Riyadh despite the international view that civilians have now become the main target of the war.

“The American government is completely complicit in this in the sense that the American government, who is not only the world’s primary backer of the Saudi regime in terms of money, weapons and diplomatic support, but the United States has actually given the green light to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for the war in Yemen,” Preston told Press TV.

Referring to reports that US military forces are working closely with their American peers on the battlefront, the analyst said the cooperation was part of an Israeli-American plan to “undermine the influence of Iran in the region and by extension nations that are aligned with Iran.”

“This is a humanitarian catastrophe and the United States has escalated the humanitarian issue by attempting to restrict aid to Yemen as well,” he said, calling the situation in Yemen as one of the “most serious human rights problems in the world today.”

Fresh off a sitdown with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Virginia state senator Richard Black turned up on Arab TV last week making an extraordinary claim about one of the US’ closest allies.

Mr Black said Britain’s MI6 intelligence service was planning a chemical weapons attack on the Syrian people, which it would then blame on Mr Assad.

“Around four weeks ago, we knew that British intelligence was working towards a chemical attack in order to blame the Syrian government, to hold Syria responsible,” Mr Black said on Al Mayadeen, an Arab news channel based in Beirut.

Mr Black said later that he meant the British were planning not to carry out an attack themselves, but to either direct rebels to do so or stage a phoney attack, with actors posing as victims.

“From what I can tell, they have been planning a fake attack, not a genuine one, but one where they actually move people out of a town and they have trained people to portray victims of a gas attack,” Mr Black said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And the plan is to use the White Helmets who have always been involved in these notorious deceptions, to portray an attack.”

Mr Black also said some chemical attacks previously reported to have occurred in Syria were British fakes, pulled off with help from volunteer first responders known as “White Helmets”.

“From what I can tell, they have been planning a fake attack, not a genuine one, but one where they actually move people out of a town and they have trained people to portray victims of a gas attack,” Mr Black said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And the plan is to use the White Helmets who have always been involved in these notorious deceptions, to portray an attack.”